Video: Virtuous Flame Introduces PlayStation Vita eCFW ARK Demo

To quote: Developer Virtuous Flame, the dev behind many projects including the recent Open CMA, just recently revealed some information on Chinese scene site duowan.com about a kernel exploit and Vita eCFW (a Custom Firmware running on the Vita within the PSP emulator) heís been working on, dubbed ARK.

Virtuous Flame revealed that he has access to another working kernel exploit other than that of Frostegaterís, working on 2.02 and running his own version of a eCFW. This is extremely good news considering kernel exploits in the psp emu can be hard to come by, itís always good to have more.

Virtuous Flameís eCFW ARK is something similar to that of Total_Noobís CEF. Virtuous Flame is already hard at work on a new eCFW Ark through a new kernel exploit, on the latest Vita 2.02 official firmware update.

ARK along with this exploit has some advantages compared to TN-C such as a neat feature of being able to instantly go into loading into the eCFW ISO menu instead of having to load the save data (note: this is most likely a feature of the game used for the exploit rather than ARK itself), like what we have seen with other exploits.

Another advantage is that game compatibility and homebrew/emulator compatibility seems to be on par with TN-C, if not extremely better. The release date seems a bit unclear for now, especially with Frostegaterís upcoming exploit release.

You can see a video of it running below along with more information from the source, however do note that its not in English:

Sources close to the Pro team have hinted that more hackers than Virtuous Flame have been involved in this project, and that this could be the CFW Coldbird had been working on months ago, for which an encrypted version got leaked recently.

PyMenu v0.4 in Development for PS Vita eCFW, Details Arrive

One of the most widely used menus for eCFW on the PS Vita is about to receive a full update, lots of new features, improved code, optimizations, and much more will come with pyMenu 0.4 and you’re about to see what it can offer, but first we’ll do a walkthrough of all the version pyMenu has had and how it has evolved from being a very simplistic menu, to a full fledged XMB replacement.

pyMenu 0.1: The beginning

pyMenu was created in June 2012 as an entry to the VHBL Menu Contest and competed against yMenu (which was also created for that contest). Most of the work in pyMenu had gone to installing the pspsdk and modifying the python interpreter to be able to load homebrews in VHBL.

The little time I had and the time the SDK + interpreter consumed left me with very little time for the actual menu. pyMenu was a pioneer in being written in a language other than c/c++, python to be precise and many thought it was not doable, and even told me to give up. Anyway, the first pyMenu release, having little time as I said, ended up being a mod of psptools, a homebrew I had previously created. This particular version of pyMenu greatly lacked in features, having only two options in the main menu: Game and Savedata.

pyMenu 0.1 only had two features: Game and Savedata. The first one to boot homebrews, the second one to install them. pyMenu 0.1 help menu, looks old and noobish

pyMenu 0.2: improving what was already done

For pyMenu 0.2 not much was added, it followed the same simple design that pyMenu had inherited from psptools. The mayor feature brought by this version was the ability to extract and view eboots icon0 using regex, which was not the best way to go as it failed with some eboots and was generally slower than most methods out there.

pyMenu 0.2 also included a lite version of psptools that allowed you to fix missing files/directories, fix stuck pixels and test out the psp buttons. Another feature this version of pyMenu got was an early version of the file browser, but this was never publicly released.

pyMenu 0.2 biggest feature was extracting and displaying icon0.png, the icons were shown in the upper left corner as back then I didn’t know how to move images around until I came across some psp2d samples. The code that extracted the icons used regex, which means there was always a possibility of failing, in pyMenu 0.3 new code was made by qwikrazor which is faster and more precise and also allows extracting pic1 (we are yet to implement pic1 though)

The help menu looks nicer in pyMenu 0.2

Alas, a very early version of the file browser, note: this version of pyMenu (dubbed 0.2.3) was never publicly released, only one copy existed and that was in my vita’s memory stick, had that stick been formatted, we would have never seen this version.

pyMenu 0.3: reviving a dead menu and turning it into a mayor homebrew

Not only pyMenu lost the menu contest, but it also earned very few popularity, most people didn’t like the simplistic nature of the menu, the style of only showing one item at a time was confusing to most people and the lack of features doomed the menu.
Soon people forgot that this menu existed, and that made me abandon the project.

Then some day I found a user mode exploit and was able to run pyMenu with VHBL and released some photos, then people started noticing the menu and I decided to finish the file browser, but instead of releasing pyMenu 0.2.3 I decided to port the browser’s menu style into the rest of pyMenu, and so development of pyMenu 0.3 began.

As the project advanced, new features were added, but I also had a lot headaches in getting some of them to work: the music player was constantly crashing, I couldn’t get isos and csos to boot, and the biggest of them all: extracting icon0 from iso/cso seemed like a really hard task, until another developer, qwikrazo87, decided to learn python and helped out with the icon0 code. To know how pyMenu 0.3 was going I made thread with some preview images, where I also asked for beta-testers, the overall feedback from users was very positive, everyone wanted to test the menu and everyone seemed to like how it was going. A few weeks after that, pyMenu 0.3 was finished.

pyMenu 0.3 was a huge update, bringing new features never done by other menus before such as Music, Picture Viewer, Plugins Manager and a File Browser with full copy, cut, paste, delete support.

in 0.3 my overall knowledge of psp2d allowed me to do more advanced stuff that I couldn’t do with 0.1 and 0.2, this led to the creation of a new menu style dubbed complete menu.

The file browser was finished and improved to provide a full-fledge browsing experience, it can also load known files (txt, mp3, png, jpg, pbp, iso, cso, etc)

pyMenu 0.3 was rich with features, including a plugins manager for ARK and CEF, ability to load isos/csos and view their icons, playing mp3 files, etc

pyMenu 0.3 featured it’s own Blue Screen of Death, many users found it funny to see the BSoD on their Vitas.

pyMenu 0.4: the future of the project

While I thought pyMenu 0.3 was going to be the last version, some users started showing critical bugs, and others started asking if some features could be added. Other devs also showed interest in the project and wanted to contribute to it. That’s when development of pyMenu 0.4 began. The project has been in development for quite some time, and has been kept a secret by people involved in it, be it developers or testers, the existence of pyMenu 0.4 never came out of its private forum.

pyMenu 0.4 is yet another huge leap in the project, it involves reviewing, rewriting and improving code, as well as adding features such as the theme system and submenu system. The ram usage has also been improved greatly, as well as the overall speed, some critical bugs have been fixed and already existing features have been improved to provide a better user experience and make pyMenu a complete replacement for the XMB.

The overall generic menu has been improved graphically. The system options allows you to do system-related tasks such as configuration, changing themes, changing the menu’s language, etc

An On-Screen Keyboard has been coded for pyMenu and will be implemented for various uses. The file browser is the first one to incorporate the OSK and the Options Menu. The new submenu system allows the user to change the Game menu independently of the system menu, so in a sense, pyMenu 0.4 is a collection of menus that you can change dynamically.

One of the best menus in the submenu system is PC Menu, which uses a PC-like arrow to move around and select the games. There is no release date and frankly I don’t know if it’ll be released soon or not, there’s still lots of bugs to fix and lots of features to correctly implement.

As always we are open to users feedback, is it going in the right direction? is there a feature you’d like to see? is there something we should change? Let me hear your thoughts.